Archives for November 2006

Victor Fam has just set up a pixel page for all the websites in the personal development field. The idea is very similar to the Million Dollar page you probably heard about,

I bet most of you had heard about Million Dollar Homepage. If you haven’t heard about it, you can have a look here. This website is basically started by Alex Tew. He is basically a student who try to make $1 million USD with the motivation to pay for his degree studies. The concept is very simple, on this website, there are 1,000,000 pixels. So he sell the pixel at $1 per pixel. After selling all the pixel, he would become a millionaire.

… but Victor is just giving pixels away for free:

My idea here is similar, but with different intention. I had setup a Personal Development Pixels page that host only personal development related sites. If your blog or website are related to personal development, welcome to the Personal Development Pixel page and get some pixels for free. I won’t charge a cents on this. I hope to collect 1 million of personal development pixels.

The idea is pretty simple: when you’re working out a particular habit, every little helps to stay motivated and interested enough. When it comes to mastering habits, creative habit naming is a very effective way of making your life easier.

I’ve also identified three main directions in creative habit naming: motivation, progress tracking and positive affirmations. In the first part of the series, I’ve covered the motivational part of creative habit naming.

Today, I’m going to talk about the second direction you can distinguish – progress tracking.

If you were asked to come up with an additional function for a name of any habit you have, progress tracking would probably be one of your very first guesses.

Why? Because tracking your progress is always a good thing, and measuring your performance in mastering a particular habit is just too cool an idea to pass it by.

Here are the two most useful ways of naming your habit with progress tracking in mind:

Regularity

As you probably know, one of the hardest things in mastering habits is the fact that it’s so damn hard to stay regularly committed. Honestly now, most of people who don’t exercise or commit regularly to some other kind of habit do this not because they’re lazy, but because it is actually hard to repeat the same set of actions over and over again without seeing great results quickly enough.With most habits, you have to stay committed for quite some time, before you finally start getting some results.

It’s not like you can try it one day, and then immediately see the positive result in just a few moments. It usually takes few days, if not few weeks, to see the first positive confirmation of your habit working towards the ultimate result you desire.

So it only makes sense to name some of your habits in such a way that the name itself will contain come kind of regular commitment.

Think of how frequently you’re going to get back to your habit. If it’s a daily action, or a weekly one – then you probably know what words you need for the name of a habit (daily or weekly, for those who don’t follow me yet).

If you look at naming a habit this way, you will actually remember many good habits you already have, which you stay pretty committed to: your Sunday church, your Saturday golf, your Thursday night out (very traditional thing here in Ireland by the way). It doesn’t have to be a weekday, either. You have many other habits, I’m sure: your morning shower, your daily job (not a very nice habit, I must admit – but hey it probably pays to do so!).

There are also some quite successful extremes which don’t even seem to have anything regular in their names, but they are habits as well: your birthday (I bet this is one habit you always stay faithful to), your anniversary, etc.

Count

This is another way of being creative with naming your habits. Just add some kind of count to the name!

For instance, here’s how my ab crunching routine is called: my daily 42 ab crunches. The name suggests, as you can see, the regularity of the habit (I’m proud to say that over the course of 3 months I’ve only skipped two days) and the count of ab crunches I’m doing every particular week.

I started a while ago with 30 reps a day. I did them for a week, and then moved on to 31 reps a day. After a week I’ve increased the number again, and so this week it is 42.

Using count in the name of you habit helps you not only track your progress, but also gives you additional motivation by confirming how far you’ve gone already. By simply reminding myself that it’s 42 ab crunches this morning, I also realize that it’s been 3 months of my exercises.

42 sounds much better than the original 30 ab crunches I’ve started with, and trust me it feels differently too – it’s harder to have 42 reps, but at the same time it feels great to be able to do 42 and still feel like you could do extra 20 just because you’ve improved so much over the time.

Another way to use count in naming a habit is to you is as a deadline. For instance, you can have a habit like this:

Learn a new language in 2 years time

Become a millionaire by the age of 30

Learn how to count from 1 to 1000 in Chinese

That’s all for today. Have I left something out? Please leave your thoughts on this topic in comments area, I would live to learn your approaches to creative habit naming. Thanks in advance!

I’ve recently acquired yet another healthy habit – doing ab crunches just before my morning shower. I’m so happy with my results that I just have to share with you some of the methodology used in the process of working this habit out. Particularly, I would like to talk about the art of creative habit naming, which I personally find incredibly rewarding.

Everyone faces a moment where a particular habit stops being attractive up to the point of giving it up. There are obviously different reasons for ending up like this, but mastering your habits can get a whole lot easier by employing a very simple yet useful technique: creative habit naming.

I haven’t seen anything written on this topic, and so mostly I had to try different approaches myself. If you know of any author covering the topic of creative habit naming in a book or a blog, please let me know.

The idea is pretty simple: when you’re working out a particular habit, every little helps to stay motivated and interested enough. When it comes to mastering habits, creative habit naming is a very effective way of making your life easier.

By picking a thoughtful name for your new habit, you can dramatically improve your chances of mastering it, simply because every time you come back to thoughts of the habit, you will reiterate the motivational name you gave it and automatically gain benefit from this.

Naming a habit may not seem terribly important, but it actually means a lot and holds a key to your success. What I offer you is not a revolutionary new approach which will make your habit feel easier to master, but it will make it seem easier and appear more attractive, which will help you stay on top of things.

You can’t have too much motivation. No matter what you do, you and your positive outcome will only benefit from any motivation you find in and for the process.

I find it very easy to name my habits in such a way that they become quite motivational. This helps me benefit from the habit even more, and generally makes my experience of working out a habit a much easier and more pleasant process.

Here are the three most useful ways to name your habit and get additional motivation from doing this:

Goal Statement

This is one of the easiest way to stay motivated: always remember your goal. If it’s an impressive enough a goal, you will get additional pleasure in repeating it every time you work on your habit, trust me!

It really is up to you to decide what your habits naming style is going to be, you can be funny, serious, playful, cheerful – you name it. Anything goes, as long as you’re clearly stating your goal.

Here are just a few examples of using goal statements in naming a habit:

Enjoying life on a daily basis, no matter what.

Becoming a better father to your kids

Getting fit in an easy and healthy way

Major focus

Another aspect of naming your habits for motivation is maintaining a focus. In many cases, it’s too subtle a difference from stating your goal, but you can actually use your habit’s name to serve both of these purposes. For example:

Becoming indecently rich while not killing yourself with work.

Meeting new people while not forgetting about the friends you already have

Building a better relationship with your partner by paying more attention and keeping your own promises.

Benefits and value

This is the last highly motivational way of naming a habit I want to cover today. It is aimed to remind you of why your habit is so cool and what exactly you are getting from regularly committing to it.

Here are just a few examples:

Learn a new language so that you can enjoy talking to natives when travelling.

Getting fit to enjoy a healthier and therefore longer life

Read more books to grow personally and gain knowledge

Have I left something out? Please leave your thoughts on this topic in comments area, I would live to learn your approaches to creative habit naming. Thanks in advance!

A friend of mine suggested I read one of recent posts by Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert.

It’s a very interesting and motivational read for anyone who feels how fear of failure keeps them from trying new things and ideas. Scott was never afraid to try his best in any area of his life, no matter how remote from his talent or knowledge it was. The post is called In Over My Head, and it’s a wonderful story of his life so far, aimed to teach us once more: don’t be afraid to fail, cause every time you do – you get one step closer to your success.

In fact, he gives you a formula he had worked out himself over the past years:

… I must confess that I fail miserably about ten times for every one success. (That’s an accurate estimate. I’ve literally kept score.) But interestingly, the failures always involved activities that seemed entirely feasible. I was completely qualified for all of the things that failed. Ironically, I couldn’t even “keep my day job.”

and at the same time, he teaches us to never fear of trying something new:

I mention these stories because over the course of my life, every time I try something different or unlikely, someone says the equivalent of “don’t quit your day job.” When I venture into areas clearly outside of my expertise, I hear “You’re in way over your head.” You’ve probably seen some of those comments in this blog.

Somehow I have to square that seemingly good advice with the fact that I’ve so often been successful against long odds, especially when I’m in way over my head. In fact, that’s when I do my best work. I gave you several examples, but trust me when I say there are plenty more.